Who is Using Tomcat or Jetty in Production?

JettyCatReady queries: "Ok, my company (a rather large, global financial institution) has recently blessed Linux for production use (woohoo!). Their position is that it will save them hardware costs to run on Intel machines instead of big IBM or Sun iron. No mention at all has been made of their position on open source. I'm part of a team that wants to make the case that the real savings are to be made by making use of things like Tomcat in place of BEA where we can (if all we want is JSP why pay a huge cost per server?). I even have a boss's boss who said in front of me, 'So I'm thinking, am I missing something by not using Tomcat? Do I have anything to lose?'"

"These are all excellent signs. The next step is to get an open source server into production. Tomcat is the natural choice because it's got the name recognition among Java app servers. Here's where I'm a little stumped. Whenever I mention the words 'Tomcat' and 'production' together, performance junkies come out of the woodwork and tell me that Tomcat sucks for production (what with it being a reference implementation and not optimized for speed). They say use Jetty (except for the ones that say to use Resin). The counter argument is that if my managers have heard of Tomcat, and seen vendors that will support Tomcat, and have never heard of Jetty, then there's no way they're going to bless it over Tomcat. (The same boss who praised Tomcat above also made a face when I mentioned JBoss. And I'm sure it has nothing to do with his personal experience with either.)

My question is, does anybody have some real world numbers of large institutions actually using these servers in a production environment? If somebody can tell me 'Company X uses Tomcat exclusively' then we would have no problem contacting company X and saying, 'So, what have your experiences been?' In other words I need leads, not actual white papers (although those would be nice, too). I need some real experiences, not just people who like Jetty over Tomcat because they don't like Sun."

Comments

My company uses tomcat exclusively

[Tet]

Like the subject says. It seems to work OK for us. Startup times are annoyingly slow. If we need to deploy a new context, then restarting tomcat brings with it a 30-45 second outage. But other than that, it's fine. Performance testing showed that increasing the number of threads the connectors can handle, and increasing the memory size (we use -Xmx500M) helps enormously.

Re:My company uses tomcat exclusively

[flipperboy]

My experience is almost exactly the same. We started using tomcat during development because it was free, and found that it performed well enough that we were confident moving into production with it. Restart times are not an issue for us; we can schedule resource drops for times when system use is minimized.

During load testing, we mucked about with the same tomcat parameters mentioned above, specifically thread count (starting and max) and heap size.

One last note: with versions 4.x of Tomcat, we've found that Tomcat is quick enough at serving up static content that we don't need to put Apache into the mix.

Try Resin

[peterdaly]

I run two production Servlet Containers. One is Tomcat 4.X, the other is on Resin. While Resin is not open source, the cost is only $500/server, which is quite low by J2EE standards. I believe it is free for development, but I could be wrong.

I tried Resin since I have heard "buzz" about it in message forums, and now can't say enough about it myself. Tomcat has a lot of quirks with reloading updated war files, reloading modified JSP's, etc. Resin does not have these problems, and I believe is much better suited for a non-stop production envirnment.

In Tomcat, it is not uncommon for me to have to restart the container when rolling out updates where certain things have changed. In Resin, I can even add or remove a JDBC Connection Pool from the resin.conf file and have to pool rolled out or back without any additional intervention from me. In short, it just works. Not only does it work well as far a few (if any) glitches, it is VERY fast as well.

For a commercial envirnment, I suggest you try Resin just to see if you find the value it adds over Tomcat worth it for you. I did.

-Pete

Resin in a production environment, plus GLUE

[eyefish]

We've tested both Tomcat and Resin, and decided to go with Resin for several reasons.

First of all it is very stable and very fast. And secondly, it has a very comprehensive way to do clustering, fail-over, and distributed sessions management.

In just a couple of minutes you can set it up to cluster with several copies of Resin, each residing on a separate machine, on the same machine, or even in the same VM. You can even set up a Resin container to be a backup of another Resin container in the same machine, so you get both inter-machine and intra-machine failover.

You can also do distributed sessions in several ways (with TCP messages, database storage, etc), and you can even force a user session to stay within the same Resin container out of a clustered group.

As for Web Services, we heartly recommend GLUE from The Mind Electric. It's bar-none the absolute best (in terms of speed, stability, and easy of use) Web Services toolkit available for ANY platform. It puts Microsoft's .Net to shame, and it's way easier than offerings from IBM, Sun, Bea, Borland, or the Apache/Tomcat efforts. It's so easy to use that already you can make your *existing* applications be Web-Services compliant without re-writing or re-compiling them!!! You just tell GLUE which classes and methods will be exposed as Web Services and it automatically generates WSDL and starts listening for SOAP clients!!!

As for a database, try the latest non-beta version of mySQL. It supports row-level locking, full transactional support using innoDB, and it is fast (specially considering its price). (Note that postgress is also a good alternative).

Note that like many here, I also agree that Tomcat and JBoss are great solutions to your needs, so if your boss definitelly cannot be convinced otherwise, I think you'll be fine with Tomcat at least. I only advice you to design your applications in a way that they can cluster, so that you can increase performance easily by adding more Tomcat servers to the mix.